Bird Flu Is Spreading in Asia, Experts (Quietly) Warn

Doctors attended to a H7N9
bird flu patient in Wuhan, China, in February. The country has been
experiencing a “fifth wave” of flu since October 2016.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

While
trying to avoid alarmism, global health agencies are steadily
ratcheting up concern about bird flu in Asia. Bird viruses that can
infect humans — particularly those of the H7N9 strain — continue to
spread to new cities there.

Since
October 2016, China has seen a “fifth wave” of H7N9 infections. Nearly
1,600 people have tested positive, almost 40 percent of whom have died.

Most
had been exposed to live poultry, but a small number of clusters
suggest that the virus could be passing from person to person.

In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention summarized some disturbing developments. The H7N9 virus had become lethal to birds, which made it potentially more dangerous to people but also easier to spot.

And
the virus had split into two lineages — called Yangtze and Pearl, after
the river deltas in which each was spreading — complicating efforts to
make vaccines.

Related Coverage

A column by Donald G. McNeil Jr. about global health news.

In October, the World Health Organization put out an update
citing new cases of H7N9 infection as cold weather set in and noting
that poultry farmers were vaccinating flocks against both this virus and
other strains.

At about the same time, a well-known virologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison showed that a Chinese H7N9 strain could both kill ferrets and be transmitted between them.

Because
ferrets suffer roughly the same effects from flu that humans do, the
development was “not good for public health,” said the virologist, Dr.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka.

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Many
microbiologists consider influenza to be the virus most likely to start
a pandemic that kills millions, as the 1918 Spanish flu did. But the
flu is notoriously unpredictable. Public health experts have become wary
about raising alarms over new strains because the grave predictions
made in 2005 and 2009 turned out to be overblown.

In 2005, it was feared
that the H5N1 avian flu, which killed or forced the culling of millions
of chickens and ducks, would mutate and spread widely among humans.

It still circulates, primarily in Egypt and Indonesia, but so far has not become a human epidemic. As of last month, only 860 people in 16 countries had tested positive for the infection. Still, more than half of them died.

And in 2009, a new H1N1 flu virus containing genes from both American and Eurasian pigs emerged in Mexico, prompting scary “swine flu” headlines and the declaration of a health emergency.

That
virus has now become one of the seasonal flu strains circling the
world. It has infected millions but has killed relatively few people.

The
2017-2018 flu season in the United States does not yet seem unusually
threatening. But Australia, where winter recently ended, just suffered
one of its deadliest outbreaks in a decade, and the H3N2 and B Yamagata strains that dominated there are now the most common ones in the United States.

Flu
hospitalizations in this country rarely shoot up before mid-December,
and Americans are far more likely than Australians to get flu shots.

The US is woefully unprepared for an emerging avian influenza....when H5N1 didn't emerge, public health lost interest.

Exactly right, Chuck. Our biggest downfall will be public apathy, and a misplaced trust in authority to save us. We have such an incredibly short attention span - a three year old could put society at large to shame when it comes to important issues - and for that, the media should take some of the blame. We live our lives blinkered and focusing on soundbites that last a few days or weeks at most, before we move on to the next big thing. Pandemic flu came and went in 2009. Why worry about it all over again when we have TMZ to keep us up to date on the important stuff?

Selling advertising space depends on keeping the public's interest, so the media keep it fresh and rarely revisit without good reason. And we have our collective heads so far up our butts that global societal collapse due to a novel virus is no longer enough reason because, hey - someone will save us like always. FEMA will provide food, scientists will develop vaccines in sufficient quantities, and hospitals will treat the sick without skipping a beat. Why concern ourselves with something that will never happen like Y2K, 2009 H1N1, Ebola?

We'll walk off that cliff and still be waiting for the safety net when we hit bottom. And that first step is going to be a doozy.

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep""Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.

I've seen that picture before, John. It really shows the disconnect between the public's image of the flu - cough, sniffles, a few days off work - and the horror of a pandemic strain that liquefies a victim's lungs and internal organs. Truly fearsome virus.

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep""Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.

Seems that we could seem some global spread this winter, similar to the rate of SARS.

I agree with Chuck with regard to the U.S. letting its guard down after H5N1 never happened, and then we had swine flu that did the same thing with being mild. Followed later by the Ebola scare. No matter what happens t this point, pretty sure nobody will take a pandemic threat seriously, and countries will fail to prepare. The stage is almost set for h7n9 to ravage the world.

I feel a little responsible at times. We put the term "pandemic" on the map back in 2005, and we have hyped the pandemic threat a couple times over the last 12 years, and now people are over it, so to speak.

We're always going to be a fringe minority, A. We can only clue a certain number of people into the enormity of a major pandemic. At least you had the foresight to create this little corner of the internet, and for that I'm grateful

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep""Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.

All of your new posts get deleted whenever we suspend you. We do that because you set up multiple accounts a day and post the same super immunity nonsense over and over and over. Stop making work for the moderators. Nobody is listening, Rishat.

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep""Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.

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